Edward E. Baptist

Office Hours: Monday and Wednesday: 10:00-11:00 in 126 Becker House; or by appointment

Research and Teaching Interests

I focus on the history of the 19th-century United States, and in particular on the history of the enslavement of African Americans in the South. The expansion of slavery in the United States between the writing of the Constitution in 1787 and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 had enormous consequences for all Americans. Indeed, the expansion shaped many elements of the modern world that we now live in, both inside and outside the borders of the United States. I am writing a book about that process: the experience of the slave trades and forced migrations that drove expansion, the systems of labor that emerged, the economic and political and cultural consequences for women and men and children.

I teach a wide variety of courses: the first half of the American survey, classes on slavery, the South, the Civil War, on U.S. political history, modernity and modernization, masculinity, and 19th-century U.S. history in general.

Courses

Education

Recent Publications and Awards

Books

Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

[Edited with Stephanie Camp, University of Washington] New Studies in the History of American Slavery, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006).

Encyclopedia of Slavery in the Americas (New York: Facts-on-File, forthcoming)

Ongoing book project: The Half Has Never Been Told: The Migration That Made African America, the United States, and the World (New York: Basic Books, forthcoming)

Articles

“The Slave Labor Camps of Antebellum Florida and the Pushing System,” in Robert Cassanello, ed. A History of Labor in Florida, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008)

“Hidden in Plain View: Haiti and the Louisiana Purchase,” in Elizabeth Hackshaw and Martin Munro, eds., Echoes of the Haitian Revolution in the Modern World, (Kingston, Jamaica: UWI Press, 2008)

“’Stol’ An’ Fetched Here’: Enslaved Migration: Ex-Slave Narratives, and Vernacular History,” in New Studies in the History of American Slavery [see above], 243-274.

[co-authored with Stephanie Camp] “Introduction: ‘The History of the History of American Slavery’.” In New Studies in the History of American Slavery, 1-18.

“‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” (reprint) in Walter Johnson, ed., Internal Passages: The Domestic Slave Trade in the United States, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005

“‘My Mind Is To Drown You and Leave You Behind’: ‘Omie Wise,’ Intimate Violence, and Masculinity,” in Crossing the Threshold: Domestic Violence in Early America, Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds. (New York and London, 1999), 94-110.